E-commerce companies eye education market

India’s leading e-commerce companies such as Flipkart.com, Snapdeal.com and Groupon.co.in are offering online courses and coaching materials, and are even facilitating long duration certificate or business education degrees.

With an eye on capturing a pie of the growing education market in India — estimated to be worth Rs.5.9 trillion in 2014-15 by India Ratings and Research Pvt. Ltd, a part of the Fitch Group — these e-commerce companies are trying to provide a marketplace for education.

While Flipkart launched its education offerings on Wednesday, Snapdeal and Groupon entered the space in the past few months. Rishabh Arora, vice-president of Snapdeal, said online education is a more than $4 billion market now and they are always on the “look out for new opportunities”. The company launched online education offerings in February and expanded the bouquet in May. Its range includes courses that are a few hours long, diplomas and degree programmes and even an MBA (master of business administration) degree. Overall, Snapdeal has 5,000 courses on offer for its over 25 million users, Arora said. The company aims to earn 20% of its revenue from service offerings including online education.

Arora said that there are several online education content providers but they are fragmented and lack a nationwide distribution network. “We are trying the organise it.” Bharat Gulia, a former senior manager of education practice at consulting firm EY, said that while education is a huge market and has good growth potential, the challenge is that people in India are used to free online courses. “The traction will come from the distance education and executive education segments. As correspondence courses shift to paper-less format, this will gain momentum,” Gulia said, adding that these are early days.

“(The e-commerce companies) would be good aggregators, lets say, like policybazar.com or makemytrip.com.” Since youngsters are their key customer base, education offerings are a natural progression for them, Gulia said. “Learning is going digital. Both e-books and digital coursework are seeing increasing adoption and Flipkart is well positioned to service the need,” Nipun Mehra, senior director, retail at Flipkart said.

The availability of e-books, certificate courses and online tests, all on one platform, will make the entire process of buying e-learning material easy, he said. Flipkart on Wednesday said that with over 1,900 products and titles, this category will offer a range of e-learning material, certification courses and online tests. Apart from formal education or preparation for competitive exams, e-commerce companies are also providing hobby courses. For example, Groupon is offering an array of skill and hobby courses ranging from wedding planner to photography and social media marketing.